Helipads are areas or platforms designed for take-off and landing of helicopters and other vertical take-off and landing aircraft (collectively, “helicopters”). While such aircraft are able to operate on a variety of relatively flat surfaces, fabricated helipads and designated take-off and landing areas provide clearly marked hard surfaces away from obstacles where helicopters and other such aircraft can operate safely. Helipads have become common place in many commercial industries, including offshore oil platforms, news agencies, hospitals, large corporations, and municipalities, all of which frequently associate helipads with their main operating structures. For example, helipads are frequently located on large open areas of the surrounding grounds or rooftops of hospitals, fire stations, high rise commercial buildings, and the like. While far less common, helipads can also be located on rooftops of multi-story residential structures, such as condominiums.
Heliports are small facilities suitable for use only by helicopters and other vertical and take-off landing aircraft. Heliports typically contain one or more ground-level helipads and may have limited facilities such as fuel, lighting, wind direction indicators, and hangars. There are no heliports or other multi-level structures or buildings with helipads which are cantilevered outward from mid-level floors of the building. In many large cities around the world, heliports serve passengers that need to quickly move within the city or to outlying regions. Heliports have advantages over airports in that they can be situated closer to a town or the city center than an airport can be situated. To be sure, heliports require smaller operating areas due to the absence of runways needed for fixed-wing aircraft. The number of operating heliports and individual helipads, varies from city to city. People who use the heliports must usually shuttle to and from the heliport via car service or privately owned automobiles in order to reach interim or final destinations, such as businesses or homes. This can result in a significant delay in an individual's time, especially when the individual needs to make several trips each week by helicopter. Frequently, the limited number of heliports, individual helipads, and surrounding city congestion and traffic, limit the use and potential effectiveness of heliports for frequent users.
What is needed is a way to combine multi-story commercial and residential urban spaces with helipads and the full services of a major heliport which would otherwise be located solely at ground level, distant and unrelated to customers in such commercial and residential spaces.